“…[M]any in Washington – including the President – are really arguing over who to hurt and how best to manage the decline of our nation. It is a framework that accepts ever-higher taxes and bureaucratically rationed health care as givens. I call it the shared scarcity mentality. The missing ingredient is economic growth… [Our plan] aims to do two things: to put our budget on a path to balance, and to put our economy on a path to prosperity. These goals go hand in hand. Stable government finances are essential to a growing economy, and economic growth is essential to balancing the budget.”

“Our budget makes no changes for those in or near retirement, and offers future generations a strengthened Medicare program they can count on, with guaranteed coverage options, less help for the wealthy, and more help for the poor and the sick… Our plan is to give seniors the power to deny business to inefficient providers. Their plan is to give government the power to deny care to seniors.”

“It’s time to clear out the tangle of credits and deductions and lower tax rates to promote growth. The House-passed budget does that by making the tax code simpler, flatter, fairer, more globally competitive, and less burdensome for working families and small businesses. By contrast, the President… wants to impose a $1.5 trillion tax increase on families and job creators.”

RYAN ADDRESSES THE DEBT BURDEN’S THREAT TO THE SOCIAL SAFETY NET

“Mounting debt also threatens our poorest and most vulnerable citizens, because those who depend most on government would be hit hardest by a fiscal crisis. We have to repair our safety net programs so that they are there for those who need them most. This starts by building on the successful, bipartisan welfare reforms of the mid-1990s.”

“The House-passed budget doesn’t just put the budget on a path to balance – it actually pays off the debt over time. We can’t achieve this goal by simply rubber-stamping increases in the national debt limit without reducing spending in Washington.

“If the debt ceiling has to be raised, then we’ve got to cut spending. The House-passed budget contained $6.2 trillion in spending cuts. For every dollar the President wants to raise the debt ceiling, we can show him plenty of ways to cut far more than a dollar of spending. Given the magnitude of our debt burden, the size of the spending cuts should exceed the size of the President’s debt limit increase.”

RYAN CONDEMNS DIVISIVE CLASS WARFARE

“Class warfare may be clever politics, but it is terrible economics. Redistributing wealth never creates more of it... Sowing social unrest and class envy makes America weaker, not stronger. Playing one group against another only distracts us from the true sources of inequity in this country – corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.”

RYAN WARNS OF A MORE CONSEQUENTIONAL CLASS WARFARE

“If we succumb to this view that our problems are bigger than we are – if we surrender more control over our economy to the governing class – then we are choosing shared scarcity over renewed prosperity, and managed decline over economic growth. That’s the real class warfare that threatens us – a class of governing elites picking winners and losers, and determining our destinies for us.”